[Off the shelf solutions]

Many of you seem to be playing around with LED (Light Emitting Diode) lighting on your cars now, and it is starting to prompt quite a few thoughts and ideas - so whilst not a definative guide, I hope that this may answer some questions by showing you what I ended up doing with mine.

There are many reasons for wanting to change over to LED lights as opposed to the conventional filament bulbs, and the biggest one without a shadow of a doubt, is because we like the look of them. There are, however, a few misconceptions that also need to be dealt with here, and the first one that comes to mind is longevity. Modern filament bulbs don`t seem to last long these days with the constant vibrations of the car, and many of you will be under the impression that LED`s will last a lot longer. There is some truth to this, in that the "burn time" of an LED will be many thousands of hours more than a filament bulb, but the sad truth is that the manufacturing process is still often very poor. Most of the LED bulbs I have encountered do not appear to have enough solder holding the electronics together inside, and I have seen an alarming number of failures of LED equipment because the components are simply falling off the circuit boards inside. Equipment that has been soldered up correctly seems to last well though.

Off the shelf solutions



There are many off the shelf LED combination lamps available, and for those of you who need to be mindfull of SVA and IVA regulations, some of them are now available with the correct "E" markings for compliance.

However, whilst these lights are great for those with new shells, some of you may already have some pre-existing shapes and holes moulded or cut out, and you may find the choice of what is available quite limited - or they may simply not be to your liking.


Bulb Conversions



It is possible to retro fit an LED converted Bulb like these shown, into your existing lamp unit - they are readily available for not a lot of money, but be cautious, as they are also not without a few problems.

The first problem that may show its head, is that of wiring polarity. Whilst most cars will have a correctly earthed bulb, we tend to run two wires to a bulb, and as long as it lights up, we don`t really care which way round the wires are. LED bulbs need the wiring to be the correct way round - positive and negative, or they will not function.

If you are searching around for the bulb types, those shown above can also come in 24 bulb and 36 bulb combinations, and my advice would be to try both types, as just having some more bulbs does not necessarily make them brighter - in fact, in most cases, I found the 24 Bulb versions slightly better. Most of the bulbs would dim the tail lights by use of an internal resistor, and allow full brightness when the brake lights were applied. If like me, you are using smoked lenses, you may find that these are a little dim - so again it was back to the drawing board.


Front "Angel Eye" Conversions



It was after messing about with the various "Angel Eye" conversion though, that I decided on a slightly different approach. I tried retro fitting the Various plastic ring shapes into my existing headlights, but the type that had a moulded ring with "cuts" on then, only utilised a few bulbs and was not just bright enough. The other conversion rings like the ones shown here, whilst having lots more lights that at least pointed forwards(!) it because very obvious that either the Chinese manufacturers have strange sizes or my standard 7" headlamp was an unusual shape, because no matter how many styles I tried, they were a very poor fit, and actually allowed a shadow to be cast when the main beam was used. Mr MOT man may not like that one - Neither will he be too happy about some of the replacement light units either, that have them built in already. Although they may look like direct replacement units, they are usually derived from the US Motorcycle market, and do not have the correct "kick out" beam pattern that we like when driving on the left - the beam is often a flat Hi/Low pattern and not great to drive on. Should you find yourself with these lenses, do not be tempted to try to improve the light intensity by uprating the bulbs either, as you may find that anything other than a 55W bulb will cause the plastic lens at the front to start fogging up and eventually discolouring under the heat. There is a lot to be said for glass lenses.


Making your own

I spotted one entrepreneurial guy on the net who was making a small circuit board covered in LEDs to go inside an original OEM light cluster, and it got me thinking about making my own. You can buy flexible strips of LEDs fairly cheaply, but there are a few keywords that you need to be wary of. The picture below shows encapsulated LEDs in a flexible strip that is claimed to be submersible, and the picture on the right shows SMD (Surface Mounted device) LED types. Some of the SMD ones are also encapsulated in a much lower profile strip. Anything that says "Cool" colour means dim and "Ultrabrite" means you can see it.



Searching around, you will soon find that you can by these by the length, but what you may not realise is that you have to be carefull if cutting them to length. Depending on the manufacturer, each strip is segmented into either three or four lights with a resistor and a mark where they can be cut, and then this pattern is repeated again and again. The picture on the right shows the 6 copper circles with a line across where you can cut. Each section will run at 12V, and if one section is joined to another along the strip, they will all run at 12V. If you cut halfway through a section, ie, just chop off one LED, then the entire section will be disabled. Each section can have seperate wires going to it should you want to have loads of little bits, but due to them being so fiddly to solder to, it may be easier in the long run to buy the lengths you need with the wires already attatched. Any cuts or end should be sealed to prevent moisture ingress - I just wiped some clear silicone over the ends.



This was my attempt at making an indicator bulb replacement to go inside my elephants foot lens, using a few flexible strips joined together with 42 Amber bulbs. I used a piece of foamex plastic sheet, and cut it to the shape of the inside of my light lens so that I could mount the indicator light to it using tie wraps. The connections are then made to the original spade terminals inside the light fitting, so that should the bulb ever fail, I can readily revert back to a standard bulb within minutes.



If you have fitted any of these LEDs as a replacement for indicator bulbs, you may now find that the flashing speed has dramatically altered, or may not work at all. This is because the original flasher relay can no longer see the heavy load of the original filament bulb, and does not recognise the electronics of an LED bulb. There are two solutions to this. It is possible to change the original relay to a special LED relay, but this does have a downside as well as the costs. It means that you have to change ALL of your indicator bulbs to LED, and you can never go back to filament bulbs. However, if you are running a mix of filament and LED, or simpy want to keep your options open, then you can put a resistor across the bulb to fool the relay into thinking you have a filament bulb fitted.



You will need one resistor per indicator bulb, and typical value is 8 Ohms - really depends upon the setup - but what is important is the wattage of them. The cheaper kits will have a 25W version, which can get astoundingly hot with indicators on, but for a few sheckles more, I would always opt for a 50W version, which although can still reach a fair temperature, is unlikely to melt the panel its attatched to. This is very easily connected across the terminals of the bulb, one end to positive and one to negative.



I also made up a panel for stop and tail lights. There is no real restriction to the number of bulbs that can be used, so my central panel was made up of 84 red bulbs for the brake lights and around the edge I used 36 white bulbs, that for some reason look dimmer behind a red lens that the red ones did, and sealed them all with silicone to protect them against moisture.



The same process was then applied to the front headlight, meaning that I could now add an "Angel Eye" conversion to a much higher quality glass front lens of any diameter.